If, in the intermediate state, we find that
“Sleep and death be truly one”—
as St. Paul himself might lead us to believe—
“And every spirit’s folded bloom”
—the slumbering soul being like a flower which closes at night—reposed, unconscious of the passage of time, but with silent traces of the past marked upon it;[28] then the lives of all, from the beginning of time, would contain in their shut-up state a record of all that had ever happened;
“And love will last as pure and whole,
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Rewaken with the dawning soul.”
At the resurrection, the old affection will revive.
XLIV.
How fare the happy dead? Here man continuously grows, but he forgets what happened
“before
God shut the doorways of his head;”